After years of controversy about casting Scarlett Johansson in the Dreamworks/Paramount live action adaptation of Ghost in the Shell, the film opened this month to lackluster reviews and poor box office numbers due to moviegoers’ frustrations with the whitewashing of its main character (Major Motoko Kusanagi/Mira Killian). Dawn Xiana Moon and Michi Trota share their differing takes on the film from the perspective of two Asian-American women with a fondness for the 1995 anime.

Michi: I was a bright eyed college freshman when I saw the original Ghost in the Shell anime. We rented a beat-up VHS (subtitled, not dubbed) from Tower Records in Boston (RIP), and crowded into my teeny dorm room to watch the movie on my old 27” tube TV.

Even though I’m sure I missed a lot of the finer details and subtext, I still remember being struck by the deep philosophical questions about humanity, individual identity, and technology that GitS attempted to tackle. Not only was it hauntingly beautiful (and at times viscerally disturbing) to watch, the story wove a complex dialog about the boundaries between humanity and technology, and where individuality begins and ends.

While Motoko is the main character, the 1995 GitS isn’t so much about her individual journey as it is about what insights her journey reveals about the nature of humanity in a world where technology can either augment or replace not only the human body, but the human mind as well. The result is an unsettling and challenging spectacle that clearly resonated with audiences for over 20 years.

By flipping the story to focus on Mira’s (Motoko) individual journey to awareness, Paramount’s adaptation of GitS manages to strip away everything that made the original so appealing, exchanging it for yet another banal — but visually gorgeous — revenge story about a hero done wrong by an evil organization. Mira’s mysterious past turns out to be a fabrication, and the antagonist she’s hunting down turns out to be another victim of corporate malfeasance and unethical science, rather than an artificial mind that wishes for human mortality. In short order, Mira and her team have no choice but to go rogue in order to find the truth and get justice.

It’s a story that we’ve seen countless times before, one that’s particularly Western in its focus on the triumph of rugged individualism. Multiple shots of Johansson stoically staring into the distance and musing about how “different” and “lonely” she feels in a cybernetic body aren’t nearly enough to convey larger themes of technology’s effect on the humanity and the concept of individuality.

By making Mira unique in her ability to have a fully integrated human mind in a cybernetic body (this wasn’t the case in the 1995 anime, where there were others like her), as well as her retaining her individual identity rather than merging with Kuze (Motoko chose to merge with the Puppet Master), any questions about the nature of humanity and how our evolution may be affected by our relationship with technology is virtually absent in this version of GitS, much to the film’s detriment.

It’s adding insult to the injury that is Paramount’s whitewashing of Motoko by not only re-casting her as a white woman, Scarlett Johansson, in a particularly wooden performance, but by also literally making whitewashing the root of Mira’s story. Mira was originally a young Japanese dissident woman, named Motoko Kusanagi, in what was clearly Paramount’s attempt at a clever nod to the original but comes off as especially condescending, who was taken by a greedy white corporate mogul and white scientist so that her brain could be transplanted into a cybernetic body, a successful merging of technology and flesh that heralds the next evolution of humanity.

Naturally, that cybernetic body wears the face of a white woman. In effect, it’s pulling a Reverse Psylocke on Motoko/Mira, a narrative choice that’s breathtaking in its blatant ignorance of white supremacy and cultural context. This same whitewashed fate was presumably forced upon Kuze, the other major character, as well, whose current body wears a white face but whose mind originally belonged to a young man named Hideo.

This choice to have people of color living within white bodies poisons the entire film, because there’s no escaping the subtext that even in this futuristic world where miraculous things are possible, the culmination of human evolution apparently wears a white face with a mind that’s been wiped of her ethnic identity. If the aim of the story was to comment on how white supremacy abuses POC bodies and twists our minds to idealize and internalize whiteness out of a sense of entitlement to our entire selves, it missed. Horribly. Instead, GitS’s narrative is the concept of how “not seeing race” always defaults to “white” writ large.

It’s all a damn shame because aesthetically, GitS is beautifully rendered, full of glorious futuristic neon signs and holographic 3D ads amidst shining towers of metal and glass, with subtle callbacks to dystopian science fiction classics like Bladerunner. Seeing the film in IMAX 3D certainly enhanced those visuals and the 3D was seamlessly integrated. The action sequences are perfectly serviceable, and the visuals of Kuze’s broken and exposed cybernetic form, juxtaposed against Mira’s smooth and seamless body, manage to evoke that same feeling of discomfort and Otherness that permeated the original anime (the scene in which Kuze removes part of Mira’s cybernetic face is chillingly rendered). Batou (Pilou Asbæk) and Chief Aramaki (Takeshi Kitano) were absolutely delightful, Aramaki in particular – Johansson could learn a lot from Kitano about how microexpressions actually work.

But for all its visual splendor, whitewashing and Orientalism are irredeemably at the heart of GitS. While the setting is still supposed to be a futuristic Japanese city, and there are Asians and other POC seen on Mira’s team and in the city, there’s no ignoring that the majority of the principal players in this story are all white: Mira, Kuze, Dr. Ouelet, Cutter, even Batou. Stripped of the specific cultural context of Japanese society’s reinvention of itself post-WWII and its resulting unique relationship with technology, this incarnation of GitS’s narrative about corporate malfeasance and stolen identity is, pardon the pun, a mere ghost of the original.

The insistence that GitS needed to be funneled through an American lens with a bankable (read: white) star, despite the popularity of the original that made it a tantalizing property in the first place, leaves the unmistakable stench of “We like your stuff, just not you” that has permeated so many offerings from Hollywood for decades, not just in the last few months (although Doctor Strange, Great Wall, Iron Fist, and Death Note immediately come to mind).

It’s one more reminder that Asians & Asian Americans are Other, that we’re expendable, and once white supremacy has taken what it wants from us, our erasure on the altar of Orientalism is still an acceptable practice in American media. Let me be clear, because apparently there’s still a temptation to avoid acknowledging that whitewashing (not “controversy” or “claims” about whitewashing) is a problem in this movie: Ghost in the Shell failed because whitewashing IS bad writing. And all the gorgeous visuals and well-choreographed action sequences in the world aren’t worth overlooking that fact anymore — if they ever were worth it. Ultimately, the choice to whitewash Motoko and GitS’s narrative itself tanked what could have otherwise been an enjoyable, if pedestrian, B-level movie.

Michi’s Verdict: Give it a hard pass and just treat yourself to a rewatch of the 1995 anime instead. For bonus points, try Jennifer Phang’s brilliant Advantageous for a masterful examination of technology, individual identity, and family sacrifice.

Dawn: I was surprised: I didn’t hate Ghost in the Shell.

Granted, the bar was low.

As an audience member, I never want to hate the thing I’m watching – I’d rather spend my time supporting art that challenges, that inspires, that connects. As an Asian-American and critic, I was fully prepared to hate Ghost in the Shell. After two years of controversy and months of ever-more-ludicrous news about Scarlett Johansson’s character – her name is Major, no, it’s Mira, but don’t worry, Johansson would never “attempt to play a person of a different race” – and slogging through 13 episodes of Orientalism and awful writing in recently-released Iron Fist, I expected a disaster. To my surprise, I didn’t find one. What I found was a very Hollywood retelling of a very Japanese story, with all the mixed results that entails.

I was born in Singapore, where the population is 80% ethnically Chinese. We have ethnic minorities there too – the country has four national languages. When I started kindergarten, I was surrounded by media that looked like me – Chinese women were featured in ads, television shows, music, and film. When I moved to Michigan at the age of five, I was a foreigner – growing up, I remember how notable it was to see any variety of Asian, let alone Chinese-Americans in anything. These days it’s still rare: a study from USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism noted that of the top 100 films in 2015, not a single one featured an Asian lead. Half the films didn’t even have an Asian character.

Given all of these things, Asian representation in Hollywood carries a very different weight in Asia than it does in the US. Asians in Asia – who, one must remember, aren’t a monolith – watch Hollywood films and expect them to be white because America is white (obviously, this impression isn’t entirely reflective of reality, but it’s one that the media we export supports). Asians in Asia aren’t looking to Hollywood to make sense of themselves or their stories – they have media that performs that function already, and if they’re part of the group that is the majority in their country, they’re used to being dominant. That’s why Ghost in the Shell creator Mamoru Oshii can make statements saying, “There is no basis for saying that an Asian actress must portray [the Major].”

Asian-Americans, on the other hand, aren’t reflected in Asian media or American media – we don’t exist. Our stories aren’t told. We’re desperate to be seen, to be treated as something more than invisible. Hollywood whitewashing hurts us because we never see ourselves reflected as fully-realized people. Which leads to us forgetting that we can be fully-realized people.

If Ghost in the Shell was created in a vacuum, the story of a cyborg wrestling with her humanity and uniqueness would have felt generic, but serviceable enough to gird stunning visual effects, cinematography, and art direction. Director Rupert Sanders and team clearly did their homework – so many shots here were lovingly crafted recreations of shots from the 1995 anime, and the film is beautiful.

Within the confines of the film, the fact that Major Mira Killian turns out to be a memory-suppressed Motoko Kusanagi, now a young, dissident runaway rather than the lifelong special ops police officer of the anime, is a twist that recalls Robocop, and one that highlights the fact that the Major’s robotic body is owned by an evil corporation intent on using her, regardless of consent. It’s not a particularly creative story, but it works.

However, art – even pop art – does not exist in a vacuum.

Context matters. And in context, the entire plot of Ghost in the Shell is a justification for casting a white actress in a Japanese role. It’s as though the story was a direct response to the criticism levied from both the fan and Asian-American communities: “We had to cast a white actress, but it’s OK because it’s important to the story and look, she’s actually Japanese underneath!”

Similarly, the attitude of the Hollywood version changes dramatically from the 1995 anime. Hollywood is concerned with fast pacing, quick cuts, and, like American society, individuality. The Major’s story here is that of a single woman wrestling with what it means to be the only one of her kind, and whether being a cyborg makes her human or not; Hanaka Robotics wants to protect her as an investment, as property, because she’s the first successful experiment in putting a human brain into a cybernetic body. She’s crafted to be a weapon.

The anime, on the other hand, like the society it comes from, is more interested in collective identity – the Major is one of many, and putting a “ghost” into a “shell” isn’t unusual. As a rule, Asian societies think more communally than Western ones – they’re more concerned about families and countries than they are about individuals. Thus the anime is more philosophical: “Overspecialize,” it says, “and you breed weakness.” Evolution is necessary, and many parts are needed to make a whole that thrives. The anime also asks what constitutes sentient life, what the implications are for society when technology makes renders bodies interchangeable. Can a machine have a soul?

Dawn’s Verdict: Viewed charitably, the live action adaptation was a typical Hollywood blockbuster set in a meticulously-crafted cyberpunk world. Viewed more harshly, the film borrows the trappings of the 1995 anime but loses its soul. It’s as though the filmmakers kept the shell, but switched the ghost.

Like this:

Van (Zazie Beetz) lies half asleep in bed next to a fully-awake Earn (Donald Glover), whose headphones are blaring to such a degree that they’re supplying the score for the second scene of Atlanta’s series premiere. Van accepts, with some reluctance, that sleep is a thing of the past and listens to Earn describe the peculiar dream he’s just had. After a quippy back-and-forth that introduces us to Van’s no-nonsense attitude—a clear coping mechanism for the cards life has dealt her—we are reminded that despite what we hope for with his curious lede, Earn is merely a mortal man who hasn’t evolved past dreaming about canoodling with hot women. The two make-out before an “I love you” arrives a beat too late, prompting them to get out of bed and start their respective days.

What’s not mentioned above, or in any of the high-brow think pieces published with haste just minutes after this instant classic premiered, is that we meet Van with her bonnet on. If that’s not titillating enough for the black women in the audience, we also watch Zazie Beetz engage in a full-on kissing scene with that blue and orange scarf still secured to her head. And what’s more, during a mild argument with Earn, we watch Van undue her bantu knots as she starts her day. If you’ve ever had a black girl for a roommate, or a lover, or just happen to be one, there’s nothing foreign-sounding about the above observations. Bonnets and protective styling are part of the average black woman’s daily routine. But what’s radical is the fact that we get to see them realized on-screen. It isn’t done in a showy way or with awkward comedic timing. Instead, they are presented in the same mundane way a character might pour a glass of water or sit at a desk—just another everyday occurrence.

But it isn’t everyday we see the black woman getting ready. Not on TV or film, at least. While women-driven shows like Broad City shamelessly reveal what female-identifying people do behind closed doors, it’s easy to forget about intersectional feminism in the midst of our excitement. The nighttime regimens and morning practices of black women are seldom shown on the big or small screen, so the inaugural episode of Atlanta is something particularly noteworthy. It’s one of the few and far between instances of a black woman going through the motions of her daily routine with an audience before her to glean new levels of awareness from her every move.

While the aforementioned scenes in Atlanta were perhaps too subtle for those outside the realm of the black experience to notice on more than a subconscious level, the scene from How To Get Away With Murder during which Viola Davis’ character, Annalise Keating removes her wig is considered a landmark event. It’s apparent that it continues to interest many inquiring minds because when you begin typing Viola Davis’ name into Google, the first result is her name followed by “removes wig.” In her debut book, You Can’t Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain, Phoebe Robinson describes this momentous occasion as “THE SINGLE GREATEST MOMENT IN BLACK WOMEN TELEVISION HISTORY.” She makes this proclamation with purposeful caps lock and then justifies why lowercase letters just wouldn’t do. She says:

It’s not an overstatement when I write that watching a part of the black woman’s beauty routine reflected back at me made me praise dance the way I do when I’m in the Pillsbury crescent‑roll section of my grocery store. This scene was so real, so honest, so raw, so everything because this is what a lot of black women look like when not in public. To present that to America was huge. Not only did it show what beauty preparation is like for many black women, it let most, if not all, non-black people into a world that had previously been off‑limits to them. (excerpt from You Can’t Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain , courtesy of New York Magazine).

And this world was introduced to them on a network—American Broadcasting Company (ABC)—that’s been around since the forties. To provide context, ABC came into fruition two full decades before the Jim Crow laws were no longer in effect. So it’s clear that covering the black person’s narrative wasn’t apart of their initial mission. Especially not a black woman’s narrative. Considering ABC didn’t cast its first black Bachelorette until 2017, the Annalise Keating wig removal scene serves as even more cause for celebration.

That said, it was also during the forties that Hattie McDaniel became the first African-American to win an Academy Award. She was named Best Supporting Actress in 1940 for her role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind. While it was much to the chagrin of many black folks of the time—and of today—that McDaniel won the award for portraying a slave and perpetuating the Mammy archetype, it’s important to note that she did make strides for black actors in film. In her book African American Actresses: The Struggle for Visibility, 1900-1960, Charlene B. Regester gives McDaniel her props and acknowledges the fact that she lent a hand in black actors breaking out of sedentary roles in film. Regester writes:

Hattie McDaniel empowered herself in Gone with the Wind (hereafter GWTW) through her transformation of the subservient (subordinate, dehumanized, and devalued) into the dominant (defiant and directing). She managed this through her commanding presence, strong posture, exertion of power, and fearlessness in the role of Mammy, and in doing so McDaniel redefined and reconstructed public images of African American womanhood. The point is debatable, but through her performance McDaniel did move this character (and character type) out of the margin and into the film’s center. (Regester, 131).

Hattie McDaniel, though wildly successful in the film world, was a rather tragic figure. Regester doesn’t ignore this in her praise of McDaniel and even underlines the devastating aspects of the actress’ life, which include suicide attempts and depression. It’s also worth mentioning that regardless of her active representation of black women on-screen—granted, in servile roles—she was repudiated by her community and mainstream black media.

Fast-forward to the year 2000. The new millennium brought us the Y2K bug, frosted lip gloss, and low-rise jeans. But for black women with healthy appetites for television, the most meaningful gift was the premiere of Girlfriends: an American sitcom that followed the lives of four very different young black women living in Los Angeles. The series had an eight-year run and black viewers aggressively sought it out because it provided an accessible alternative to shows like Sex and the City, notorious for leaving black folks out of the narrative save for the fetishization of them (read: the season six arc where Miranda dates her black neighbor, Blair Underwood). That, and it was also just a damn good series that any audience could enjoy. Its IMDB page boasts an impressive list of accolades to prove it.

Girlfriends also sky-rocketed the career of the ever-exuberant, Tracee Ellis Ross. We had the honor of watching Ross get ready every week during the early aughts and we’re allowed the same access even today, as we try to keep up with Rainbow “Bow” Johnson’s chic hairstyles on the ABC hit show black-ish. Tracee Ellis Ross has always had a strong command of her hair. Even in the instances that don’t grant us permission to her morning or nightly routines, it is clear that her hair is never an afterthought. Aside from her stellar comedic timing and vivacious personality, her hair has always been her crowning glory. It doesn’t overshadow her and it isn’t her prized possession, but rather, it serves as a beacon of light for black women struggling to maintain their natural hair. It’s something to aspire to when the going gets tough with all of the expensive leave-in conditioner, time-consuming protective styles, and homemade hair masks.

In 2014, Ross spoke to Entertainment Weekly about the natural hair boom in network television and her relationship to it. She said:

I think it’s huge that I’m wearing my natural hair texture on ABC in primetime. As Dr. Rainbow Johnson on black-ish, I think my hair is part of the reality of this woman’s life. She has four children and is an anesthesiologist and a wife. She doesn’t have a lot of time to fuss with beauty, so her look is pretty simple. I’m very conscious of how I wear my hair on the show, and yet it’s the way I wear my hair as Tracee. You hire me, you hire my hair, and you hire my ass. It’s all coming with me.

Much like Hattie McDaniel brought black actors out of marginalized roles with little to no speaking parts, Tracee Ellis Ross has managed to bring natural-haired black women to the forefront. And with them, their routines.

However, it isn’t just natural-haired black women breaking barriers on-screen. Cue the BET series Being Mary Janecreated by Mara Brock Akil, the same woman who helped bring Girlfriends to your television set. The show follows the public and private life of Mary Jane Paul (Gabrielle Union), who’s a successful television news anchor based in Atlanta. Mary Jane struggles to strike a balance between her demanding career, nagging family, and the near-impossible task of finding the perfect guy. Being Mary Jane is unique in that it spends an unprecedented amount of time showcasing Mary Jane’s routine. The majority of episodes begin with Mary Jane getting ready to start her day and end with her preparing for bed.

Each morning, we watch Mary Jane begin with her daily affirmations in the form of reading the quotes she’s pre-written on the post-it notes that litter her headboard, generously-sized picture window, and bathroom mirror. We watch her traipse around her immaculate home, take a luxurious shower, remove her bonnet, and apply her makeup as she readies herself t for another exhausting day of work at Satellite News Channel. And the same goes for her nighttime routine. The series puts Mary Jane on display as she wipes the day off, takes her IVF injection, ties her hair up, and slips into bed to answer emails.

In an especially memorable episode, Mary Jane is in crisis mode when her hair stylist cancels her appointment without notice—a frightening phone call that, more often than not, every black woman has been faced with. By the time Mary Jane learns her stylist has flaked, she has already removed her sew-in, revealing Gabrielle Union’s real hair. While she has a healthy, gorgeous head of hair, Mary Jane is petrified at the prospect of going to work the next day to do a live news segment sans weave. So in a last-ditch effort, she calls her niece over that very night to reinstall her old weave. While Mary Jane relaxes with a glass of wine as her niece, Niecey tends to her hair, she confides in her:

You know why I begged you to come over here? Because your perfect aunt was terrified of going to work without her weave. Terrified that no one would think I was beautiful. That people would think I was average and I’d be invisible. So maybe that pedestal you put me on is a little too high. I’m human (Season 2, Episode 7: Let’s Go Crazy).

This intimate look at a situation black women deal with all the time is refreshing to see on TV. The black women in the audience can relate to it and everyone else is given the opportunity to gain a better understanding of black haircare. Moreover, this is a chance for non-black viewers to start to comprehend the pain black women feel as they attempt to reconcile their beauty with what the rest of society considers ideal or beautiful.

In the last several years, the most accessible place for black women to catch glimpses of each other’s beauty rituals aside from being in the same room has been YouTube. We all know by now that YouTube served as a launching pad for an outstanding number of creators including black folks like Issa Rae (formerly of Awkward Black Girl fame and currently the creator and star of the HBO hit Insecure) and Donald Glover (who started out on Youtube doing derrickcomedy and is now the creator/star of the previously mentioned FX hit Atlanta) who’ve moved on to full-fledged careers in television. YouTube is also home to a slew of vloggers who’ve found a way to monetize their passion for the billion-dollar industry that is beauty.

Black women religiously flock to the pages of vloggers like ItsMyRayeRaye and Patricia Bright who’ve long since passed the millionth subscriber mark. They’re just two of the countless beauty enthusiasts out there who’ve made careers out of the beloved Get Ready With Me (GRWM) video. Whether it’s a tutorial on getting your edges laid or simply a woman trying out her new eye shadow palette in front of the camera, GRWM videos have fast become a practical and emotional tool. They provide insight on navigating an industry that often ignores melanin and kinky hair. They also just serve as an oasis that allows black women to see themselves reflected in something other than a mirror.

The GRWM video is certainly not exclusive to YouTube’s black community, but it is an invaluable asset to black viewers who rely on it to provide them with beauty information that isn’t readily available. These videos review products while keeping the black consumer’s best interest in mind; which is rather revolutionary because despite the black consumer’s buying power being worth well over one trillion dollars, the black buyer is arguably the most neglected. And these videos come in all shapes and sizes. Some GRWM vloggers are talkative and will regale you in a hilarious “what had happened was…” type of story while revealing the secrets of a good contour. Others are less chatty and offer a more soothing option with soft, serene music to achieve that easy-like-sunday-morning aesthetic. Some are more lifestyle driven and are perfect for the black woman who just wants to live vicariously through an “It” girl who actually looks like her. A black woman having the ability to open her laptop and watch another black woman have brunch or decorate her apartment is a simple joy, but it isn’t taken for granted because we all know these are infrequent happenings.

With new shows like Atlanta, Being Mary Jane, Insecure, Queen Sugar, and the like, it’s easy for the black woman to feel as though she’s been presented with an embarrassment of riches. For once, she doesn’t have to watch a show just because it boasts black cast members. She finally has a few options and most of them are available during the coveted primetime slots. But in the grand scheme of things, mainstream media still has a ways to go when it comes to the visibility of black women. For so long, black girls have clutched classic films like Waiting to Exhale or Poetic Justiceclose to their hearts and continue to re-watch them for just another glance at Janet Jackson’s iconic box braids or to fall under one more wistful spell as Angela Bassett sits in front of her vanity.

The archives of the black woman on-screen-and-doing-her-thing are no doubt gaining new files, but these moments are still limited and meant to be savored. Before a black girl wearing a bonnet on-screen is no longer a needle in a blonde haystack, it is perfectly within every black woman’s rights to press rewind and watch the hell out of these scenes. Afterall, they’re what keep her buoyant in a world that makes drowning easy. Until they’re no longer an exciting rare occurrence worth writing about, scenes of the black woman getting ready will always be of the utmost importance.

Neyat Yohannes works as a freelance writer and a regular contributor to Okayafrica, Hello Giggles, The Coalition Zine, and Blavity.

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Fans are remarkably good consumers of content in already-codified, tight knit communities. To market something to fans is an exercise in adapting or channeling some aspect of the fan object or experience into the marketed product — knowing your target demographic is, after all, Marketing 101. It’s with this understanding that director Daniel Schloss and writer Charlie Sohne created Truth Slash Fiction, an in-production television series about boyband fans who write slash fanfiction, the fan practice of writing queer romantic fictional stories about characters and real people. The writers of Truth Slash Fiction quickly caught the online attention of the One Direction fandom, especially writers of slash fanfic about One D. Rather than the fateful meeting of target demographic and product, however, the virality of the show’s trailer on Twitter in the fall of 2016 was met with mixed, often negative responses by the fans of the British-Irish boyband. While One Direction fans served as the show’s inspiration, the majority of them also hated everything Truth Slash Fiction represented.

Certainly not the first nor the last of its kind, the case of Truth Slash Fiction is representative of the importance of understanding fandom practice in marketing towards its communities. Ultimately, there’s a difference between marketing towards fans broadly, and marketing specifically towards fandom and the interior to the fandom practices. From television series like Truth Slash Fiction, to commercials, and even brands on social media, using inner-fandom practice like shipping and fanfiction, and targeting fandom desire as a marketing tool has produced mixed results among fan communities. Whether received by fans as a knowing hat tip from brand to fandom, or demonized as a flagrant abuse of the fourth wall, brands and producers marketing products towards shippers highlights the slippery nuance of public versus private fan practice, and the monetization of fandom. While an understanding of fandom practice is crucial for success in marketing to these communities, to be marketed towards or publicized to begin with sometimes challenges the very fan practice that external parties are attempting to identify with. If successful marketing is all about visibility, what happens when you market towards a demographic that doesn’t want to be seen?

As consumers, we’re familiar with the myriad ways that fandom is marketed to the broader public. Beyond the easy thematic jump from boyband fans to boyband television, we’re even more familiar with less related cross-promotion between brands and produced media: It’s Captain America chasing Bucky in a 2016 Audi commercial, or Twilight inspired vampires in an earlier 2012 Audi commercial. For the purpose of analyzing fan response to the phenomenon, the most relevant distinctions to make are in 1. who is doing the marketing, 2. what the product is, and 3. the intended audience. To use the Audi commercials as examples, the Audi motor vehicle company marketed a product unrelated to the produced media (a car, an external good unrelated to the fictional worlds of Twilight and the Marvel Cinematic Universe) to the broader public utilizing the popularity of the movies featured.

In the realm of nonfiction, celebrity product placement, like a Diet Coke commercial starring Taylor Swift, is similar — while Swift’s music has nothing to do with carbonated drinks, her association with the product drives traffic, if not outright profit. We watch the commercial, featuring Swift being overwhelmed by a horde of cats, not because of an interest in Diet Coke, but because of a popular interest in her person. These examples, directly referencing or featuring sub/objects of fandom, are marketed towards their fans as well as the public. Whether or not I’m a fan of Taylor Swift, the commercial is still accessible to me as a viewer. There is, after all, nothing exclusive to the fan experience about a pop star drinking soda. Of the ways in which fan objects intersect with marketing, these are the most common examples.

To market a product towards fandom, however, is an altogether different phenomenon than the above. Where Audi and Diet Coke reference and feature popular media objects for broader promotional purposes, marketing towards fandom utilizes specific understanding of inner-fandom practice, and/or is exclusive in its fandom references. In short, it’s making jokes or references only fans would get through referencing fandom things. Furthermore, brands marketing towards fandom more often takes place on platforms like Twitter — as opposed to more broad-reaching, public-facing modes like television commercials — where fan communities already exist. As Twitter accounts provide brands with easily accessible, humanized online presences, the platform facilitates easy engagement across fandom and corporation. Brands are ultimately able to market to fandom on Twitter through engaging with them as if they were fans themselves.

In response to a July 2015 tweet from a Supernatural fan that “@Astroglide ships Destiel,” or the popular slash ship of Dean Winchester and Castiel, the lube manufacturer’s Twitter account wrote, “We really just want to see a scene where Dean tries to explain to Castiel what lube is. Gold.” The reference to fanfiction about the popular Supernatural pairing proved amusing for many fans. Fans engaging with the Astroglide account made both declarations of love for the brand, as well as suggestions for how to further engage with the show and its fans. As Astroglide continued to tweet about Destiel throughout the day, the account repeatedly referenced the success of its engagement with the fandom, at one point commenting, “letting Gabe log onto our Twitter account today was clearly a good choice #Destiel.” As marketing to Supernatural fans utilized exclusive fandom references, tailoring tweets to fans of the CW drama alienated the rest of its followers, and the account knew it. “All of our followers that aren’t Supernatural fans are so confused right now,” wrote @Astroglide, but the brand didn’t mind; Accompanying the tweet was a reaction gif of SNL’s Kristen Wiig crying over a photo of Supernatural star Jensen Ackles. That the Astroglide account continues to tweet about Supernatural and even live-tweet episodes of the series is a testament to the benefit of the online buzz that the engagement with the fandom produces. Though tweeting about Supernatural may not translate into offline purchases from fans of the show, it’s not for nothing that Astroglide now seems to be, according to one fan on Twitter, “the Lube of Choice for most DeanCas fics these days.”

When done well, marketing towards fandom can yield significant online social currency within the targeted audience. At its best, it’s amusing when an otherwise impersonal corporation makes what seems like an inside joke or reference to something you love; At its worst, it’s capitalism fishing for clicks in the guise of a social media manager trying to fit in with all the kids online. For some within the One Direction fandom, a hat tip from brands to the popular fan fictional relationship between band members Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson serves as a beloved testament to the reality of “Larry Stylinson”.

In response to a 2016 Instagram post from Styles of a “lonely buffet,” the Pizza Hut UK Twitter responded, “@Harry_Styles Louis will be back soon. Then you can all come to Pizza Hut for the greatest buffet on earth… #LouisYumlinson.” At the suggestion that Harry was “lonely” without Louis, fans responded with notes ranging from excitement that “Pizza Hut knows what’s up,” to declarations that “Pizza Hut is my new favorite pizza place now!” With over 15,000 retweets and over 13,000 likes, the original tweet by Pizza Hut was a one-off, humorous attempt by the brand to engage with a subset of One Direction fans — arguably, one of the largest fandoms on the platform — with the obvious intent to trend online. Fans’ amused response was ultimately predicated on the perceived mutual acknowledgement and understanding of the Larry Stylinson phenomenon. Larry was so real, it seemed, that even Pizza Hut could tell.

But what happens when the product being marketed to you is about you? Cue Truth Slash Fiction, the indie television series about boyband fanfiction. When the trailer for the television series first made the rounds on Twitter in September of 2016, One Direction fans who responded positively to the show’s premise expressed excitement over the recognition. More than just a one-off reference from a brand online, an entire television series was being shopped about their experience. In responses to the trailer on Twitter, excited fans wrote, “this is the story of my fucking life,” and tagged their friends with notes that there was “finally” a show that they could relate to. For some, the show was seen as a potential opportunity to normalize fandom practice. Despite initial discomfort, one fan on Tumblr wrote, “this might forces [sic] the public to realize, that a fandom’s fascination with slash fics is not the minority.” Better still, they continued, “this might be a powerful way of letting the world to know more about Larry.” But while the show intended to express an understanding of the One Direction fandom both on Twitter and in its product, the vast majority of responses ranged from wariness, to outright fear and distrust of the series and its intentions. Regardless of any effort expended by the Truth Slash Fiction writers to accurately depict and market a product for and about fans, to do so in the first place demonstrated a lack of understanding of the fandom itself. Even worse, by relying on fans to both promote and watch the show, Truth Slash Fiction cast its lot with a demographic that inherently mistrusted its product.

After the trailer for the series went viral in the fall of 2016, show producer Daniel Schloss tweeted, “Larries just lifted @truthslashfic to new heights causing #truthslashfiction to trend worldwide. The biggest and best fandom has our back.” Schloss rightfully attributed the virality of the show to Larries, a subset of the One Direction fandom oriented around the belief in a romantic relationship between Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson. As both the inspiration as well as the target demographic for Truth Slash Fiction, Larries were indeed responsible for the series’ online buzz. Why they shared news of the show, however, was based less in admiration than it was trepidation. Even within fandom more broadly, real person fiction (RPF) is still a comparably controversial topic in and of itself. For many fans, the potential exposure of the fandom to the broader public prompted fears of ridicule or abuse. As one of the top replies to Schloss’ tweet noted, “you better have our back and not make us look bad okay?” Though Schloss attempted to assure the fan by replying, “we got you,” the statement was less than satisfactory for fans who routinely experience online harassment for writing the very fanfiction that Schloss & Co. were hoping to profit from. While an understanding of fandom practice is crucial to successful marketing, Truth Slash Fiction’s best attempts still fell flat for their target demographic. Where, in the end, did they go wrong?

As Aja Romano wrote for the Daily Dotregarding a 2015 film of a similar topic called Slash, “the story of queer slash fanfiction is the story of women building a community of their own.” For men external to fandom culture to repurpose those stories or even attempt to retell them ultimately misses the point of these communities very existence. As one Tumblr fan wrote in a critique of Truth Slash Fiction, “it keeps coming back to agency and how WE DON’T HAVE ANY in this situation because they’re just using us for material without actually listening to us.” And although mainstream discussion of fanfiction has risen in recent years, it’s often underscored by a mischaracterization or derisive undertone toward the writers themselves. By depicting the One Direction fandom, Truth Slash Fiction bridges into the even more complicated territory of fans whose fan subjects are real people. By drawing more attention to One Direction fanfiction, the showrunners runs the risk of breaking the fourth wall, or the invisible barrier between fan practice and fan subjects. In a post with over 200 notes on Tumblr, one fan noted that drawing attention to the fandom felt like a violation of a protected community. The post concluded, “they’re threatening our safe space and the place that makes us happy because they want to make money off of us and exploit us and I will never be okay with that.”

Even worse, what fans deemed the most egregious example of exposing their engagement occurred while attempting to assure the fandom of the show’s intentions. In an interview with fan-based blog Head Over Feels, Truth Slash Fiction writer Charlie Sohne attempted to convey his understanding of the One Direction fandom by name dropping several works of fanfiction he had read in preparation for the show. By explicitly naming and even linking to certain works, the showrunners publicly broadcasted fan works not intended for public consumption, and faced the wrath of fans as a result. Three days after the publication of the interview, the official Truth Slash Fiction Twitter account posted an apology: “At the time, we assumed that complementing work was a universally positive thing to do — we now understand that was a wrong assumption to make.” With reassurances that they would be directly apologizing to the named authors, the apology missed the point. The showrunners’ publicizing of fan works in a non-fandom space to bolster their own credibility within the fandom not only betrayed the trust of potential viewers, but also made vulnerable the authors they attempted to compliment. As one fan noted in response to the apology on Twitter, “you’re putting a spotlight on a very intimate area of the lives of fans regardless.” Regardless of the fact that it technically existed in public online, fans were adamant that their fan practice was only intended for their community. By marketing their fandom for public consumption, Truth Slash Fiction made visible something fans never wanted to be seen. Before the show had even been sold, fans had already turned against it.

While tweeting fandom references, or even attempting to incorporate your brand into fan culture itself may be advantageous to one’s social media strategy, marketing a product towards fandom necessitates an understanding of fan communities. Particularly when relying on a single fandom to be both viewer, promoter, and serve as inspiration, such understanding is even more crucial. Beyond the semi-amusing clickbait of fandom-oriented tweets, constructing an entire product around fan practice for fans is tricky territory perhaps best left alone. Knowing your target demographic, it seems, may also mean knowing when to not engage in the first place.

Allyson Gross is a writer and climate justice organizer based out of New York. She is a recent graduate of Bowdoin College, where she wrote a thesis on One Direction and populism. Allyson can be found @AllysonGross, mostly tweeting about boybands, conspiracy theories, and Hamilton.

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In part 1 of a 3-series audio review, Dawn Xiana Moon and Michi Trota review the first 4 episodes of Netflix’s latest series, Marvel’s Iron Fist. They’d fully intended to watch 6 episodes but apparently they didn’t have enough cake and cocktails to make it any further. Part 2 will cover episodes 5-9, and Part 3 will cover episodes 10-13, with a special audio track of Dawn and Michi reviewing the finale as they watch it after briefly recapping episodes 10-12.

Transcription provided by Beth Voigt

DAWN: Hello, The Learned Fangirl! This is Dawn Xiana Moon…MICHI: …and this is Michi Trota.

DAWN: This is our review for Iron Fist, episodes 1 through 4 of Season 1, and hopefully there won’t be a Season 2, frankly. I’m Dawn, I am the founder, producer, director of Raks Geek, which is a nerd-themed belly dance and fire performance company, and as is relevant for this I was born in Singapore, I’m Chinese-American, and I moved to the U.S. when I was 5.

MICHI: And I’m Michi Trota. Among some of the things that I do are I am the managing editor for Uncanny, a magazine of science fiction and fantasy, and I am also President of the Chicago Nerd Social Club board of organizers. I am Filipina-American, born and raised here in Chicago, and I have read comic books for most of my life. I am fairly familiar with Iron Fist, and I have feelings. LOTS of feelings. Primarily over the fact that we had to slog through four episodes and that’s all we could take in one sitting.

DAWN: With booze.

MICHI: [laughing] And cake.

[both laugh]

DAWN: With booze, cake and coffee. So, right, well, we’re gonna get right into this review. So the best part of Iron Fist so far has been the opening sequence, which we both liked.

MICHI: Yes, it was very pretty! And it looked like, y’know, actual martial arts. Also, I will say some of the things that we’ve been reading about the show before they started, there was a lot of, “Well, the female characters are really great.” Actually, they weren’t wrong.

DAWN: The female characters are amazing, especially the woman who plays… what’s her name…

MICHI: Oh, Jeri Hogarth. The lawyer, Jeri Hogarth…

DAWN: She was fantastic. You might remember her as Trinity from The Matrix. I want to be her when I grow up.

MICHI: Carrie-Anne Moss is pretty much how I feel watching this whole thing so far. Which is: walk in, look around, call bullshit where she sees it, and says “Come on,” [snaps fingers 3x] “let’s get going. You are wasting my time, and my time is precious.”

DAWN: It really says a lot that the female characters in this are the most competent characters that we have. And the male characters are… largely douchebags.MICHI: Except for Dead Dad.

DAWN: Except for Dead Dad, who is… interesting, but definitely not… he’s setting himself up to be a villain character.

MICHI: Definitely. But it is…[sighs] all of the characters are far more interesting to me than Danny Rand. Which says a lot about how this is supposed to be his show, or at least the show is about his journey, and his journey is really being propped up by some very competent, very interesting women who are clearly much better at what they do than he is.

DAWN: The entire premise is that Danny Rand, Iron Fist, is… I mean, he’s the hero, right? The show is named for him. But really, it’s all of the women who are far more competent at keeping him in check, handholding, literally babysitting him at one point, and teaching him how to adjust to his new roles.

MICHI: Yeah, Joy Meachum, just the fact that she actually, she is literally babysitting him.

DAWN: She is literally babysitting him at one point.

MICHI: Or just the fact that he keeps running to Colleen Wing, and saying “Can you help me?” and she’s like, “What are you doing, dragging me into this? I told you I don’t want to be… okay, now I’m dragged into it, and I have no choice.”

DAWN: My favorite (as in not-favorite) scene is where Danny Rand walks into the martial arts studio in the middle of them having a class, interrupts the black teenage kid who is teaching everybody else…

MICHI: …who is Colleen Wing’s best student…

DAWN: Mm-hmm, who is presumably really good at what he does. Danny Rand comes in, white guy barges into the studio…

DAWN/MICHI: [together] IN SHOES!

[laughter]

DAWN: Well you have to have shoes in the dojo! He’s the only person, really, who wears… even… even…um…

MICHI: Joy Meacham.DAWN: Even Joy Meacham takes off her high heels when she walks into the dojo. But heaven forbid Danny Rand actually take his shoes off. And then he comes in and he lectures the students, interrupting the teacher’s class at a studio he has no business being in, and says, “I’m going to teach you about respect and martial arts.”

And let’s talk about how Danny Rand is always trying to throw around some Zen Buddhist sayings, and trying to throw Mandarin everywhere. His first introduction to Colleen Wing is, he speaks to her in Mandarin, because clearly when you see the Asian person you have to speak to them in Mandarin. Because that’s going to be their first language.

MICHI: I do appreciate that she looks at him and says “Can you speak to me in English, I haven’t [spoken Mandarin] since I was a child. Also, I teach kendo, not kung fu.” The fact that he walks into her dojo the very first episode and is like, “Yeah, so really you should be teaching kung fu, it’ll make you more money…

TOGETHER: …you’ll get more students…

MICHI: And just… ohhhh… all the…

DAWN: The white guy comes in and whitesplains to the person who is running the martial arts dojo about how to run their dojo. It is the epitome of white privilege.

MICHI: Everything about this is the epitome of white privilege.

DAWN: And male privilege. Let’s not forget those together.

MICHI: I understand that the showrunners have talked about “No, this is about seeing Danny’s progression from someone who is naive, who doesn’t really understand the world and who is going to learn how to be a better hero, who is going to mature, and a lot of it is going to be…” Because he has all of these really awesome women who are helping him put Broken Danny back together. Which is: NO, that’s not how feminism works…

DAWN: Definitely not how feminism works. It’s pretty much how women who have dealt with men throughout history who are not competent enough, and we have to prop them up, and don’t get any of the credit for it.

MICHI: If we’re talking about structuring the narrative where it’s about Danny coming back to New York after 15 years, and of course he’s going to feel out of place…

DAWN: Mm-hmm.

MICHI: He’s grown up in a monastery and around monks, there is not a lot of materialism, and even though that is the background he grew up with, being 10 and losing that life…

DAWN: 15 years is a long time.

MICHI: 15 years is a long time.

DAWN: Especially when it’s 15 years of your childhood and growing up years.

MICHI: But the fact that he’s walking into this, being very naive, and expecting that he can walk in to a building where he is not dressed correctly, he’s barefoot, he clearly hasn’t showered…

DAWN: In weeks, probably.

MICHI: …like he owns the place. I get that if that had been framed correctly, that actually could have been a very tongue-in-cheek, this is what it’s like when you have white male privilege that you’ve never completely lost or been trained out of. But he’s been in K’un-Lun with monks for 15 years…

DAWN: Which should have literally beat that out of him. They show flashbacks where they’re literally beating him with sticks.

MICHI: And he hasn’t grown up. There’s no maturity that he has come out of his experience with. There is no centering or sense of purpose, he’s walking around like… he’s basically like the character from Big, he is a kid in a man’s body, and I can understand how that is something they’re trying to go for, but…

DAWN: It doesn’t work.

MICHI: It doesn’t work! It doesn’t play well. It plays annoying, it plays condescending.

DAWN: He’s so condescending. Everything he does is condescending.

MICHI: If we had to drink every time he decided to drop a, quote, “Zen Saying…”

DAWN: We would have been dead.

[both laugh and groan]

DAWN: Also, if we took a drink every time they flashed back to his childhood scenes on the airplane where his parents are about to crash, we would… be drunk.

MICHI: In terms of using flashbacks as a narrative device.

DAWN: They’d be fine! As long as they’re not showing us the same flashback about 10 times every episode, exactly the same shots for those same flashbacks.

MICHI: I understand they’re trying to show us that Danny has been traumatized. And really, it was a traumatic event! There’s no way they can get around that.

DAWN: But it also has been 15 years. Presumably he’s grown a little bit as a person since then. But he acts as though it was yesterday.

MICHI: Well it can be that way for somebody who’s been through trauma. But it is, in terms of how they’re using that in the story, they’re beating that like a dead horse. It’s constantly happening, and I know it’s supposed to reinforce that he’s still traumatized. And particularly coming back to New York, coming back to the last place he was happy with his parents and they were alive, I can see how that would be something that triggers a lot of those traumatic flashbacks.

DAWN: But he’s not really acting like it’s being triggered, right? He’s acting as though he walks around with, like as though when he was in K’un-Lun he was walking around and that was the thing that was ever-present always, like his parents had died and he saw them die. There isn’t kind of an arc of “oh, he’s kind of moved back from this, he’s coming back and finding his roots and he’s finding all these things that are kind of bringing things out in him,” which is what you’re seeing with Joy, you’re seeing that with some of the other characters like “oh, we’ve moved on and now he’s bringing things back.” But with Danny, it’s as though he’s been stuck, nowhere, for 15 years and has just been plunked back down and had nothing happen to him in the interim, except somehow he’s a really good fighter.

MICHI: Yeah, there’s… I don’t really see a lot, so far in four episodes, that the experience in K’un-Lun has changed him, outside of: he has a glowing fist and he knows kung fu. That’s pretty much it. At least with Ward Meachum There’s actually a fairly interesting interplay with what it means to be a son of privilege and he’s smarmy, and…

DAWN: He’s also a huge stereotype.

MICHI: He’s Gordon Gekko from the movie Greed in the ‘80s. There is so much about this entire series to me that feels aesthetically like they are trying to play up an ‘80s vibe to it.

DAWN: As though we’re supposed to love the nostalgia or something with it, even the music sounds like ‘80s-style video games.

MICHI: It is. And I can see that they’re trying to go for something stylized. It’s very ambitious, I don’t think it’s pulled off. It feels… it’s not nostalgic in a way that makes you like “oh, I see that you’re paying respects to a particular genre, to a particular feel, but you’ve made it relevant and you’ve made it fun.” This feels very… it’s weighing it down. Down to the music… yeah.

DAWN: It feels like it’s stuck in the ‘80s.

MICHI: Yes, absolutely.DAWN: As opposed to feeling like we’re doing an homage to the things that we loved about the ‘80s. There’s some scenes that they’ve filmed… there’s a scene in the elevator where Danny is fighting off a whole group of Asian guys in order to save Joy Meachum, and that, they had the ‘80s-style music kind of going on, and they turned the lights, so that all of the lighting was red, and it really felt like you were watching a video game. There were even multiple…

MICHI: Oh yeah, there was a cut screen, there was a split screen…

DAWN: …there was a lot of action going on. And let’s talk about the action scenes! And how they were surprisingly boring.

MICHI: They feel very… joyless to me. There’s not a lot of… technically, they’re doing things correctly, people are hitting their marks, it looks like, but there’s no kinetic energy to those fight scenes. They feel very by-the-book, they feel very obligatory.

DAWN: I think it’s because there isn’t anything emotional driving it. We watched the first four episodes tonight: there isn’t a lot of emotion and story kind of driving you into the characters. You connect with Colleen Wing, we’ve all been… well, if you are a woman, you’ve probably been that person who comes in and coddles the Nice White Guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing, especially if you’re a woman of color. So I sympathize a lot with Colleen Wing, I sympathize a lot with Joy Meachum, I sympathize with our lawyer friend who is just incredibly competent and very good at what she does. But I don’t sympathize with any of the men, the men who are supposed to be driving this show are generally… they just feel lifeless. You don’t connect with them emotionally at all.

MICHI: Yeah, I appreciate how they’re trying to make Harold Meachum this… he’s caught between two things, he made a deal with the devil, and now he is…

DAWN: He’s set up to be the most interesting character by far.

MICHI: Yeah. He’s got very complicated motives. He’s clearly not trustworthy, he’s clearly very self-interested. But he also cares about his kids in a very weird…

[both laugh quietly]

MICHI: Look, you put your kids in a, you were clearly a bad father, you would put them in a terrible position but you still don’t want them to get hurt. He’s complicated and he’s interesting.

DAWN: He’s abusive, but he loves them.

MICHI: Which is… eughh… it explains a lot about how his kids, particularly Ward, is as a person. But it’s still feeling like… there’s a lot of scenery-chewing, there’s a lot of kind of banging you over the head with how manipulative Harold Meachum actually is. You’re not quite sure what his end-game is, aside from he made a deal that he doesn’t like the terms and he wants to get out of it, so he sees Danny as a way for him to get out of this deal.

DAWN: That also leads to one of the big problems so far with Iron Fist is that our characters are really not fighting for anything. Danny could be set up to be fighting for his identity, to be fighting for his life, but really, the thing that’s coming across is that he’s fighting somehow for a company. And you’ve got both of the Meachums, all three of the Meachums actually, also fighting for a company. It’s just not really compelling as an audience member to watch people fighting over business deals in a company.

MICHI: [loudly] IN A MARTIAL ARTS SHOW.

DAWN: You want them to be fighting for something, something more. [laughs] That matters to the world.

MICHI: Yeah, I can see the fact that Danny says, what, three episodes in? It takes three episodes until he gets to the point where he’s like… he keeps saying repeatedly in the first two episodes “no, it’s not about money, you don’t understand.” We don’t get him actually to say until episode three or four (and the fact that we can’t even remember that clearly after having just watched it) that “no, this is not about money, this is my name. This company has my name. It means something to me.”

DAWN: Right. It’s set up from the very beginning that this is about my name, this is about my past and my identity and not the company, but it took so long to get there. And in the meantime it was just The Company, The Company, The Company, which doesn’t make for very compelling viewing because hopefully we’re fighting for something that has a little bit more weight.

MICHI: Yeah, I think Joy gets a little bit more to deal with, I think, in terms of saying, “Well, here’s why I’m staying: It’s because my father is dead, it’s the thing he left to us, it was really important for him that we kept this going. Also if we leave, we get nothing.” [Dawn laughs] But she at least gets to say all that, and the way they set her character up that makes sense.

DAWN: Because this is all she knows. It’s all that was given to her.

MICHI: And they make it very clear in her characterization that she loved her father, this is part of her wanting to do what he wanted because now that he’s gone, the company is her only connection left to her dead father. That, again, makes more sense. They drew that line much brighter for Joy and why she wants to fight for Rand Corp, versus Danny coming in and saying “Well, this is mine, I want this, because it’s mine.”

DAWN: It’s mine. MICHI: It doesn’t make for a compelling reason to follow the hero. And again, I’m sitting here being like, this is… I’ve seen a lot of reviews, and I agree with a lot of the sentiment: This is supposed to be Iron Fist. This is a story about mystical martial arts. Of course his whole identity as a billionaire is part of the origin story.

DAWN: But now we’ve made the entire story about his identity as a billionaire, which is a problem.

MICHI: Yeah, and then there’s the idea that, like… a lot of the Netflix shows, which Dawn I don’t think you’ve seen, you haven’t seen Daredevil, you haven’t seen Jessica Jones yet…

DAWN: I’m behind on everything.

[both laugh]

MICHI: What they do really well is that they set up these particular characters and make them seem like they are part of – this is what the world really looks like. They rarely reference what happened in The Avengers; they call it “the incident” because that’s what – y’know, aliens first fall from the sky, New York has a vast amount of damage that people are still recovering from.

DAWN: And you have a psychiatrist making a nice little reference to that as well.

MICHI: But what those shows do really well is that they ground those characters, but they don’t do that without sacrificing the core of the story. Jessica Jones is about surviving assault and learning how to live with that. You have Luke Cage coming in, and this is about Harlem, this is about finding his place in the community that has taken him in. With Daredevil…ehh, Daredevil I still have problems connecting with, but you still get to see Matt’s journey from becoming a vigilante to actually becoming Daredevil. I’m not… I can see how they’re trying to do that same grounding for Iron Fist in this-is-what-the-real-world-looks-like and making it more of a “here’s how we can fit a martial arts mystical superhero into the real world…”

DAWN: But four episodes in, we haven’t really seen anything mystical except that you see his fist glow a couple times. And then the way that they do the flashbacks, it seemed like they wanted to do something stylized, they do something on screen with him, lights, and kind of straight lines in front of Danny’s face every time he’s going to have a flashback, which makes it seem like something mystical is going to happen but actually it’s just a flashback at that point. So the only thing magical you’re getting is his fist.

MICHI: There’s a lot of set-up, and it’s not giving me payoff quick enough is what I feel like.

DAWN: And every episode at the end, too, it feels like they want to do that thing at the end where they leave you on a cliffhanger so you have to watch the next episode immediately. But again, because you don’t find the characters particularly compelling and because the story’s not particularly compelling, the cliffhanger just doesn’t really feel like a cliffhanger.

MICHI: No, and why… [sighs] We had to wait, what, three episodes before we finally got to the fact that the Hand shows up?

DAWN: Mm-hmm.

MICHI: And we don’t see the Hand, we hear a disembodied voice.

DAWN: Which could be cool, done in the right way. But somehow in this it’s falling a little bit flat as well.

MICHI: Yeah. I feel like they are taking too long to set things up. It is being dragged out, and I feel like they are focusing on the wrong things. They are focusing on the corporation, and again a lot of it really just doesn’t hook me because here again the way it’s framed, irrevocably, is another billionaire white guy who is fighting for a corporation. He can say it’s about getting his name back as much as he wants, but the way it’s being framed is, “we’re in boardrooms, we’re around a bunch of rich people,” and…

DAWN: He gets 51% of the shares of the company, and that’s a huge plot point.

MICHI: …and I. Don’t. Care. I don’t care. There’s no connection to Danny trying to understand his identity and reconnect with it. I don’t see that.

DAWN: And it also takes them about three episodes before they can even have all the characters agree, “Yes, this is Danny Rand.” As an audience member, you are very, very clear from the beginning, yes, this is going to be Danny Rand, so this should not be three episodes worth of exposition getting people to believe that he is Danny Rand. We should cover that really quickly towards the beginning how everybody realizes who he is. You’re waiting for it, you’re waiting for it, okay, people still don’t believe him, people still don’t believe him, people still don’t believe him, when are we going to something where we don’t already know how this is going to go. Because clearly, everybody’s going to believe he’s Danny Rand at some point, but it takes us three hours to get there.

MICHI: Yeah. The fact that when he finally decides to go to Hogarth, to be like “hey, so, y’know, I remember you,” he actually does it correctly! He gives her information that only she would know.

DAWN: And she asked the right questions! Which is also important. Somehow all of these characters are not asking questions that only he could respond to very properly.

MICHI: Yeah, or even when he approaches the Meachums for the first time, he’s just like “Oh no, you should totally remember me!”

DAWN: He just keeps saying “Oh, it’s me, it’s me, you should believe it’s me,” without offering proof. Well, these are the things I know that nobody else could know… until, again, we’re about three episodes in before he offers up some of these things.

MICHI: It is frustrating, because… also again the identity thing, is like, I’m even thinking about if this narrative, the way they’ve already written it, if it had been done with an Asian-American character, if an Asian-American playing Danny Rand, what it would mean for framing the idea that people are not believing him, how it would mean that they are reacting to his talking about “no, I’ve learned something mystical, I’ve acquired martial arts skills, there is something special about what I can do,” I’m thinking about how much it would even shift the conversation of “they don’t believe him” to “they don’t believe him plus they’re also looking down their noses at weird Eastern mysticism things.”

MICHI: All of these things when they’re coming out of Danny’s mouth, when he talks about, oh, Zen Buddhist saying here… talking to Colleen about how like, “oh, your form is bad, you should be trying this, you’re trying too hard, you’re spending too much energy…”

DAWN: There’s this great scene where he… he is depending on her for help, and he’s come into her studio, he’s sleeping on her floor in the corner, and then he decides somehow he needs to prove himself to her and they end up sparring a little bit. Where he’s mansplaining and whitesplaining to her, the person who you’ve seen be incredibly, incredibly competent as a martial artist, and who runs the dojo that he’s sleeping on the floor of, telling her how to do things and telling her how she’s bad at things. It was incredibly frustrating to me to watch. And of course because Iron Fist/Danny Rand has to be the main character and he has to be the best person at things, of course he wins that fight, which was also incredibly frustrating.

MICHI: See, he didn’t even need to win the fight. Watching that scene, I had to immediately compare it to the fight scene between Mako and Raleigh in Pacific Rim. Where they’re fighting each other to see how well they can actually mesh as partners.

DAWN: With mutual respect.

MICHI: Neither of them actually wins, it comes to a draw. And it’s not saying that Mako is any less than Raleigh. It means that they are equal but we get to see them spar, and they actually get the measure of each other in a way that is done respectfully. There is a way they could have done that scene, where Colleen recognizes that Danny actually does have skill without him having to A: white-dude-splain martial arts to her, and B: beat her. There was no reason why he had to be better than her.

DAWN: That’s the biggest problem with Danny Rand is that he has no respect for anybody.

MICHI: And that really is sort of, he is the walking epitome of white dude privilege in this. If they were doing this in a way that I think was turning that on its head, and showing that it would come to bite him in the ass…

DAWN: That would be interesting!MICHI: Yeah! I mean, they might have that show….

[both laughing]

DAWN: But we’re four hours in!

MICHI: …but we haven’t seen that at all. It is everything… and the fact that after he ‘splains to Colleen about how she should do martial arts, she actually uses some of that and realizes she can win fights that way.

DAWN: UGH, it reinforces that he is somehow better than she is. And, of course, he is better than everybody.

MICHI: I actually really enjoyed the scene where Colleen is showing Joy how to throw a punch correctly.

DAWN: That was actually really great.

MICHI: Yeah, I would actually like more of that! Because it was at least two women talking about things that have nothing to do with Danny, but it also gave some really cool character moments for both Joy and Colleen. We get to see more of her being sensei. We get to see that Joy is actually capable. Because we do get to see her throw a decent punch in the elevator fight scene, but then it has to be all about Danny because Danny is the hero. Getting to see more of those character interactions, or just getting to see that these characters are able to do things where they don’t have to rely on Danny to come in and save them is just… there’s so much, the show just feels really messy, I don’t think it even knows what kind of show it wants to be yet. There’s a lot of “let’s tease the Hand here, let’s show Danny doing martial arts here. Let’s show Colleen going into cage fights and being kick-ass,” and that’s giving us a little bit more about her character. Is she doing it because she really enjoys it now, is she doing it because she needs to make money..

DAWN: There is the implication that she’s doing it because she really does just feel the need to beat something as hard as possible, even though it’s violating a lot of her own principles. And also she needs the money.

MICHI: Frankly, after watching four episodes of this, I can relate to how Colleen feels because I would like to beat something really really really hard, and we are enduring this… because we are getting paid.

[both laugh]

MICHI: I really relate to Colleen Wing at this point.

DAWN: Let’s go back and talk about the hashtag #AAIronFist and some of the missed opportunities. There are just so many missed opportunities that you could have had if you had just cast an Asian-American in the role of Iron Fist as opposed to – Michi coined the hashtag #MartialArtsMayo.

[both chuckle]

MICHI: Really, I love martial arts. I love martial arts as a genre for television, for storytelling.

DAWN: And you’ve done a little bit of martial arts yourself.

MICHI: The scenes where Colleen is leading the students in sword forms..l I took kendo for several years as a kid, and those scenes felt really real for me, where she’s just having them go count out in Japanese as they’re doing strikes. That felt real, to me. When Ward Meacham walks into a dojo and doesn’t take off his shoes because he’s trying to bribe Colleen, that at least makes sense for me because he is that kind of… douchebag.

DAWN: He is set up to be that. That is in character of him not taking his shoes off.

MICHI: Yes. He is Gordon Gekko the businessman douchebag who thinks he can walk in and own whatever he wants because he has money. The fact that Joy has taken off her shoes…

DAWN: …says a lot about her character also!

MICHI: Absolutely. And the fact that Danny walks in again, when he decides to white-dude-splain martial arts to the students, disrespecting the teacher, who is already there, because he doesn’t think the teacher is being hardass enough…

DAWN: And presumably, he’s had 15 years of training about how you should respect the person who is set up to be the teacher, whoever is in charge currently. And to respect the dojo and the space that you are in.

MICHI: I’ve read enough of the comics to understand that Iron Fist is supposed to be someone who knows responsibility. Who understands what his power means for him and what he’s supposed to do. The fact that Colleen has to yell at him and and say, “Oh, by the way, this place is a refuge for people who are escaping abuse.”

DAWN: Beat up in other places.

MICHI: They’re beat up in other places, and they should be able to come here and know that they can learn without being beat up, and you just fucked that.

DAWN: The irony, of course, is that he’s lecturing all the students about their lack of respect.

MICHI: I just… there are so many things that are inconsistent with the character, and that are clearly inconsistent with the character because they’re trying to move the narrative in a very specific direction. Danny is clearly… they’re trying to mesh the fact that Danny wants to take his name back with the corporation and dovetail that with his mission as Iron Fist to stand against the Hand. So of course the Hand is involved with Rand Corporation and he wants them out. Okay, that makes sense the two of those together.

DAWN: Although interestingly enough, they’ve set up this whole thing about how the Hand is really evil and how he has been training basically his entire life just to defeat the Hand, but he also doesn’t really understand that the Hand is real.

MICHI: I DON’T UNDERSTAND THAT! I just don’t!

DAWN: How the Hand is basically like a fairy tale, like the demons in the dark that are going to come to get you. So he is surprised when he finds out they are real. And he tells Joy Meacham that the entire reason he has been training to be Iron Fist was literally because basically he wanted to be better than the Asians at being Asian. They told him that he probably couldn’t do it, so he decided he needed to beat all of them. He refers to it as a job, getting the best job he could possibly get.

MICHI: Because he felt entitled, like, “I want that. I want that and I’m going to get that.” You cannot get more white-privileged-dudeish than that.

DAWN: And you could certainly set up that part in the story as something where now he is lost and he has nothing and so he finds his identity and working really hard in order to be this thing, but that’s not how this is playing out here. This is playing out, with the way that the story is written and the way that the actor is playing it, as “I’m just entitled and I want this and now it shall be mine.”

MICHI: You know, you even could have had that angle with an Asian-American Iron Fist. You could have had an Asian-American Danny Rand who is the son of privilege. And, I think it was Andrea Tang, had written this really really awesome blog entry where she was going, “What if?” What if Danny Rand was Asian-American, he was a son of privilege, he came from a family that was heavily assimilated, that gave up speaking the language at home, that fully assimilated into white culture. What happens when you grow up like that? And you are torn between wanting to fit in with the white kids who are still laughing at the other Asian kids at your school, and saying “Oh, well, hey, you’re not like that, right?” and you’re like eeeeh, what can you do? And so he still has those markers of feeling entitled because he is rich. Because he grew up in those circles. But that’s also tempered with: What does it feel like when you are trying desperately to fit in and not feeling like you fit in anywhere? They’re still trying to have White Danny Rand do this, he’s doesn’t feel like he fits in clearly because he sucks at corporate culture, he doesn’t know how to talk to the board members…

DAWN: He’s the opposite of corporate culture.

MICHI: He doesn’t know how to dress, he doesn’t know how to speak the language…

DAWN: He doesn’t realize he needs to wear shoes.

MICHI: So I would like to point out this: that one of the justifications that the producers for the show have given, saying “well, Danny Rand has to be a fish out of water,” the implication being that you cannot be Asian and be a fish out of water around other Asians…

DAWN: I was born in Asia, and I feel like a fish out of water going back to Asia.

MICHI: You’ve talked about this, when you’ve gone back to Singapore, you’re constantly having to re-learn traditions that you don’t do here.

DAWN: I’ve had to re-learn etiquette, even. I have to re-learn what it means to show respect. The way that respect plays out in different cultures manifests itself very differently from place to place. I mean, I’ve talked about how, when I go to Singapore, I have to know that, okay, now in order to show respect to my grandmother and show her that I care about her and that I love her, I’m supposed to take food from the communal plates in the center and put it on her plate. And that is a measure of caring, a measure of love. This would be very, very weird to do in an American setting. People would be like, “Why are you putting food on my plate? I can put food on my plate myself, that’s fine.”

MICHI: Well see, that’s the thing. We haven’t seen Danny be fish-out-of-water in K’un-Lun at all. The way we’ve seen him be fish-out-of-water is around other white people in the board. So why would an Asian or an Asian-American Iron Fist not be a believable fish out of water around other Asian people, but white Danny Rand is quite a believable, relatable fish out of water around other rich white people. Why is that an okay fish out of water setup? Because that’s what he really is. When he walks in, he doesn’t really know how to talk to the Meachams any more, he doesn’t know how to work in business, even Hogarth is looking at him like, “yeah, no, you don’t know what you’re doing, this is not how you talk to people.”

DAWN: [laughing] “So you just sign the paperwork.”MICHI: Or even saying look, if you want to win back your company, you need to learn how to speak this language. She makes it very clear that he has no idea what he’s doing. And okay, that works! But why wouldn’t it work with an Asian-American?

DAWN: And there would be this aspect if we had an Asian-American in the role, also dealing with what it means to have your culture, what it means to learn about what your culture is even supposed to be. There’s a news flash! Not all Asians speak an Asian language. I can’t actually… I am a singer-songwriter, I sing in Mandarin Chinese, English, and French, but I actually can’t speak Chinese. I can sing in it, but I can’t speak in it. And frankly, if I were going to speak Chinese in a home environment, it would have been Cantonese, it wouldn’t even have been Mandarin. Which is not something someone comes up to me on the street speaking. People come up to me on the street and like to speak Mandarin to me as though I can understand what it means.

MICHI: I have had very awkward conversations with random strangers in Chicago because there is a large Filipino population here, and if somebody else is like, oh, if another Filipino manages to note that I am also Filipino and they’ll start talking to me in Tagalog and I’m like, “I’m sorry. I don’t speak Tagalog” in a smattering of words… I never learned. Because my parents never taught me. It was, “You need to know English, you need to be able to speak without an accent. You need to do this in order to fit in.”

DAWN: And for me, Singapore actually, a lot of people in Singapore speak English natively. My dad speaks English as a native speaker and he is Chinese and he was born in Asia and spent most of his life there. There are these assumptions that Americans make, especially in terms of these people who are making these movies and making films and TV shows, that somehow Asians have to fall into some particular thing that they think all Asians are. And that’s not… the Asian-American experience is not a monolith, we all come from very, very different places. You might have somebody who is very comfortable speaking Mandarin Chinese all the time. You might not!

MICHI: The fact that Danny is speaking Mandarin in this, it is not… it’s another way to show that he’s special. He’s a white guy who speaks Mandarin, he is a white guy who knows how to do martial arts, in fact he is the best martial artist ever, because he is the mystical Iron Fist. There is so much about that that is just insulting, and erasing.

DAWN: It really feels like they just keep sprinkling these things in, not as though this is really a character thing that somehow he’s really been immersed in this culture and this is just kind of how he thinks. It really feels like this imposition by the writers to just throw in little tidbits of things all over the place to remind you somehow he’s spent 15 years somewhere in the exotic East.

MICHI: The things that ring true to me when he did them in the show were when he’s, like, sitting on this big opulent bed, and he takes the bedspread and he puts it on the floor. Because that’s what he’s used to sleeping on. That actually read ‘real’ to me because this is how he’s lived for 15 years, that’s what he’s now comfortable with. I got that bit. That was one of the few things that felt honest about taking his experiences in K’un-Lun and showing how that affects how he interacts with the world when he comes back to New York. Everything else though, the dropping Zen witticisms here, or Buddhist wisdom there…

DAWN: By the way, Asians totally go around dropping Zen Buddhist things all the time.

[both laughing]

MICHI: Oh, yeah! We talked about this… don’t I always talk like that? I mean, we’re talking in metaphor constantly with mystical wisdoms, where you’re just having to sit there and interpret what we said.

DAWN: Magical Asian people!

MICHI: I don’t know about you, but i’m totally magic.

DAWN: I wear a lot of glitter, so I sparkle a lot?

MICHI: It is really… there is so much about this show that is frustrating, and I’ve been frustrated with it before we even saw the episodes, but I really wanted to be surprised. I really, really did. I would have loved nothing more than to have been proven wrong about what I thought this show was going to be like. And the thing that really galls me is that this isn’t even so terrible that I can laugh at it, it’s just… boring!

DAWN: It’s just bad. We were just talking about how it’s not even fun-bad, it’s just bad-bad.

MICHI: There’s so much. The narrative is a mess, it’s very slow, and not in a way that’s giving you a slow burn.

DAWN: Slow in that it just feels like it drags, a lot. Because they won’t get through the things you know they need to get through in order to tell you something a little bit more interesting that maybe you don’t know yet.

MICHI: And I know… we’re four episodes in, that means we have… [sighs] what, nine more? I think? To go? To get to 13?

DAWN: Yup. Yup.MICHI: This is going to be hard! It’s going to be really hard and the thing is like, I would keep watching it, just for Colleen, I want to see more of Colleen’s character development.

MICHI: [laughing] I’ve heard we have to wait for episode 8 for Lewis Tan to actually show up. I actually… we finally got to see glimpses of Madame Gao. As soon as she showed up in Daredevil, she was immediately one of the most interesting characters to me because they made her multilayered. You actually get to see a older woman, an older Asian woman, who is deceptively diminutive, who is really cunning and complex, so I want to see more of her. And again, I feel like, y’know I will say that they were actually correct in that the women so far in Iron Fist are the best thing about the show.

DAWN: Definitely the best thing about the show. But that still does not make it actually a feminist show.

MICHI: No.

DAWN: The filmmakers seem to think they did their jobs making it a feminist show somehow by writing women characters that are really awesome. The problem is that the women characters in general are so much more competent than the men that you actually just watch it getting incredibly frustrated about why they are not in charge instead.

MICHI: Absolutely. Again, I am Hogarth, walking in, being like, “You are all messing up. What the hell is wrong with you? You are doing this wrong, give me your shit, let me take care of it.” The fact that she looks at Danny, I think in episode three or four because they’re all blending together, she is like, “You have been given a rare opportunity. Don’t mess this up.” That is what we were all saying to Marvel about Iron Fist is that you have an opportunity to really take a character that had very troublesome, Orientalist, white-savior origins…

DAWN: And you could have done something awesome with it.

MICHI: You could have done something with this! And… you didn’t. You could have given us a show that still would have awesome martial arts, that still had a really cool character that is a fish out of water, who is learning to reconnect with his identity.

DAWN: You could have had a show that had given us a show that could have given us a different dimension for Asian-Americans on TV.

MICHI: And instead, we have Martial Arts Mayo. Which, I’m never going to get [laughing]. That’s what this is! This is the blandest interpretation of what martial arts can be in a show. It’s not doing anything to advance the characters, it’s just like well hey, we’re gonna have a couple of fights, we’ll show that Danny knows how to do martial arts… but there’s no passion behind it.

DAWN: Right, and a fight scene really isn’t very interesting to watch if it’s not motivated by character, or motivated by the story. The problem is, none of these fight scenes… with a few exceptions, there are some exceptions to this, but for the most part the fight scenes aren’t really motivated by something emotional happening in the story. And they don’t give you anything about character except to make you more frustrated about how Danny is condescending and has no respect for anybody.

MICHI: [under her breath] Yeeeeeeah.

DAWN: And the fight scenes with him actually end up extra-frustrating even though whoever’s doing the fighting in them, for him, is clearly competent enough in that.

MICHI: Nine more episodes to go… we’re going to need a lot more cake. And a lot more wine. And we’re going to have at least two more of these audio episodes for it, so…

DAWN: And the last audio episode, we are planning to do this sort of a… we can’t call it Mystery Science Theater-style, but we will be doing an audio track along with it, that you can watch, and we’ll quite frankly probably end up doing a drinking game because this is just kind of right for that, and I don’t even do drinking games.

MICHI: I know that there is a literal dragon coming up in the story. And I just don’t know… I want it to be good, I really do, I feel like there’s going to be a lot of yelling at the TV…

DAWN: There’s going to be yelling at the TV literally five minutes into this, for reference.

[both laughing]

MICHI: You know, yelling with a mouthful of cake. At least there was cake.

DAWN: At least there was cake!

MICHI: There was cake. Cake made things better.

DAWN: So. Episodes 1 through 4. Where would you rate this on a ten-point scale, so far?MICHI: I’m gonna be generous and say three?

DAWN: [laughs]

MICHI But the episodes overall, yeah, this was a three. However? Colleen Wing? Jeri Hogarth? And honestly, Joy Meachum? They get a seven.

DAWN: I’m actually going to give this show a four. The extra point because of those characters, they are really fantastic.

MICHI: All I can say after watching this: Marvel, please, please, for the love of everything, give us Daughters of the Dragon. Give us Misty Knight and Colleen Wing together. Have Jeri Hogarth show up because she’s frickin’ awesome! If there’s a way to work Joy Meachum into that, because they’ve gotta fund this whole thing some way, that’d be great, just give us Daughters of the Dragon because that’d go a long way towards making up for this giant #MartialArtsMayo sandwich.